"Spain, not Italy, was required to protect the rights of the people on board and, therefore, in principle, also to provide landing in a Place of Safety (safe port)." This is what the judges of the Open Arms trial wrote in the reasons for the sentence with which, in December, they acquitted former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. The conclusion, which is among the reasons that exonerate the leader of the League, means that the absence of the obligation to issue the PoS by Minister Salvini drops both the charge of refusal to perform official duties and that of kidnapping arising from having unlawfully denied landing in Italy to refugees in August 2019.

The court reaches this conclusion on the basis of some considerations "which - the judges write in their reasons - define the natural central profile assumed by Spain in the affair (despite an artificial calling into question of Italy)".

The Spanish Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centre had actually "operated, right from the start, a minimal 'first contact' coordination, such as that aimed at orienting the ship (Open Arms with the rescued migrants, ed.) in identifying the responsible States (or at least those it had deemed responsible) for the area of the accident, first Tunisia and then Malta, putting the vessel in contact with the respective competent authorities".

From the very beginning, Malta, "in declining its responsibility for the first two rescue events, - they explain - had clearly indicated Spain (flag State) as the only authority that should have assisted the vessel in continuing the operations". And again - they specify - "even after several days, Spain had finally granted the Pos, urging the vessel to go to Algeciras and then to the closest Spanish port to its position (Mallorca), no longer being able to deny, at that point, increasingly pressured by stringent humanitarian reasons, its legal jurisdiction over the event. Finally - the court reasons - when Open Arms had expressed the impossibility of reaching the Pos indicated to it, Spain had arranged for the dispatch of the Navy ship Audaz to pick up the rescued migrants and take them to Spain (organizing an alternative solution to reach the place of safety)".

The Italian State therefore had no obligation to provide the Safe Port (POS) to the Open Arms vessel. «The belief that in the case at issue in these proceedings no obligation to provide the POS was imposed on the Italian State, nor, therefore, on the current defendant, - the judges preliminarily explain - evidently exempts the panel from analytically addressing various issues raised and heatedly debated by the parties such as, for example, those relating to the circumstance that the Open Arms vessel could have acted as a POS, or the fact that the first intervention had not in reality involved a vessel in distress, or the fact that the time spent waiting for the POS could legitimately be explained (also taking into account the considerable ordinary disembarkation times used in other rescue operations concluded in Italy, even at a time other than the Salvini regency of the Ministry of the Interior) by the need to first provide for the distribution of migrants among European States».

"It can be safely excluded - the judges write - that the Italian State had rejected the migrants (and among them the refugees, those who would have had the right to asylum and those who could have run the real risk of suffering a violation of their internationally recognized fundamental rights) towards a nation in which there is a reasonable risk of suffering harm to their life, freedom, or psychophysical integrity".

(Online Union)

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